"Webbiquity" is about being everywhere online when and where buyers are looking for what you sell. It's what I help B2B clients achieve through a coordinated strategy of SEO, search marketing, social media, brand management, content marketing, and influencer relations, supported by the right marketing technology.

A big reason for this is a lack of organizational tools. Remember trying to manage your brand’s presence on social media pre Hootsuite? It was the stuff of nightmares. You were constantly switching between tabs, hoping that you weren’t missing a valuable comment or brand mention, and every day was broken into hour-long pieces, each of which was punctuated by sitting down and writing a post.

And then, one day, a host of tools were released that made it SO MUCH EASIER.

Social selling needs that day, that one dashboard to rule them all, and, unfortunately, it hasn’t come quite yet (at least that I’m aware of.)

But several incredibly useful tools have popped up that work to focus your efforts, making it easier to identify, engage, and ultimately convert your social prospects.

5 Easy Tools for Social Selling Success

Listen to Two Million Channels at Once with Hootesuite’s UberVU: Hootsuite’s UberVU listening tool (or something like it) should be the veritable foundation of any social selling effort. Allowing you to track keywords and conversations across more than twp million channels, UberVU makes it easier than ever to discover important discussions and important customers across the internet. From social to industry publishes, to niche blogs, UberVU helps you pinpoint potential customers and conversations at exactly the right time.

Focus Your Prospecting Efforts with InsightPool: If you’re looking for extremely targeted prospecting, look no further than InsightPool. With tools for prospect identification within your social network, customizable lead scoring, and some seriously slick options for staying engaged, InsightPool offers the opportunity to leverage your business’ social community in a big way.

Make the Most of Your Network with CircleBack: You may know CircleBack as an intelligent address book that keeps your professional contacts up-to-date automatically. But, what you may not realize is that CircleBack is also a great way to leverage the connections your sales teams already have. Because CircleBack tracks titles and companies and shares those changes with you, it’s easy to see when contacts move into decision-making roles or switch companies, and when it might be a good time to ding them on social.

Grow the Right Relationships with Nudge:Nudge makes keeping in touch with all of your social prospects a breeze. It scans whatever networks you connect it to (LinkedIn, email, Twitter, etc.), and highlights those you have the strongest relationships with and who might be worth a bit more effort. Then, based on their social posting and interactions, Nudge recommends content and conversation topics you can use to build a great relationship and close a sale.

Deliver Brand-Appropriate Content with WittyParrot: Because every social sales conversation is different, it’s easy for a brand’s voice/message to get lost in the deluge of articles and collateral different reps are sending out. WittyParrot works to change all that by collating relevant outside articles and useful internal collateral and delivering them directly to your team. In doing so, it gives decision makers the ability to control the consistency of your message and gives your sales team access to the resources they need.

With these five tools in place, you’ll have all your bases covered. With solutions listening across social channels, giving you better insight into existing networks, and facilitating relationship building through communication and outreach, you have everything you need to close deals is an organized, impactful way. Now go sell something!

Austin Duck is Content Marketing Manager for CircleBack and regularly contributes to StartupGrind and elsewhere. He lives in DC with his wife and army of cats.

Social media monitoring tools are increasing essential for companies of all sizes as the explosion of social media content renders manual monitoring efforts hopeless. But how do you choose one? With almost 200 social monitoring tools (and new entrants still coming to market), available at a range of price levels from free to if-you-have-to-ask-you-can’t-afford-it, how does an organization select the right social monitoring tool for its needs?

Whether you’ve a selection team working on this or the entire project has been delegated to you, here are nine critical considerations to keep in mind as you review and evaluate your options.

Range of coverage. Virtually every social media monitoring tool worthy of the label covers the big social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter), social bookmarking sites (Digg, Reddit) and content sharing sites (YouTube, Flickr). Many include at least the most popular blogs as well. The best also monitor message boards and forums, easy to overlook but critical particularly for niche b2b products and services. For example, a discussion of the latest developments in aerospace composites is probably more likely to happen on a niche engineering forum than on Facebook.

Frequency of alerts. News can travel extremely fast through social media. Even if it’s “only” a customer complaint, you don’t want it sitting out there unanswered for long. It’s imperative that your social media monitoring tool provides realtime or near realtime monitoring and alerting, so you can respond to critical items promptly. Certainly, not every comment requires an immediate reply, but when a customer or prospect has a question or issue, response time matters. And in social media, the whole world can see how fast (or not) your response time is.

Workflow capabilities. A blogger raises a question about your company’s financial outlook. A user is frustrated by a perceived malfunction in your product. A customer shares an idea for an enhancement. A highly favorable product review is published in an online journal. You may discover any of these events through social media monitoring, but in each case not is the response different but the respondent is too. The financial question needs to be directed to your CEO or CFO; the user issue to customer support; the enhancement idea to product management; and the product review to marketing. If there is any significant volume of social media commentary about your product, service or company, look for a social media monitoring tool that provides workflow tools that make it quick and easy to notify and direct the right person to take action on each new mention.

Value. Price is always a consideration of course, but in selecting a potentially critical business tool like social media monitoring (consider the cost of BP’s social media failure), the more important consideration is “value,” as in: does the tool do at least as good a job at meeting the specific social media needs of my company as competing tools, and is it priced similarly or lower than tools offering equivalent functionality? “Free” is always a popular price point, but in the world of social media tools (as in many other areas of life), you get what you pay for. There are several free social media monitoring tools that provide limited functionality but can serve as a starting point for small businesses; however, larger and more socially active organizations will quickly recognize a need for more sophisticated fee-based offerings.

Support and training. Even with advanced UI design, more sophisticated tools are fundamentally more challenging to use. Be sure to get clarity on what kind of training is offered upfront, how much personalized assistance is offered as part of the package, how to get questions answered and how robust the internal help system is for ongoing use.

Metrics and reporting. What kind of reporting capabilities does the tool provide? Your specific needs will of course vary based on company size, level of social media activity and your organization’s specific goals and objectives, but two critical roles of reporting for any organization are: 1) the ability to demonstrate progress/change over time (e.g. more website traffic driven by social media) and 2) actionable analytics (measures that enable you to determine whether you should do more a specific activity, do less, or do it differently).

Geographic/language coverage. Enterprises that do business globally need the ability to track social media mentions across borders and in multiple languages. Global monitoring capability adds cost and complexity to a tool, so don’t buy it if you don’t need it, but for multinational businesses, this is essential functionality.

Integration with other applications. Again, small companies with fairly simple programs don’t need to be too concerned with this, but companies with larger, more complex social media programs should investigate how their social media tools under consideration integrate with applications such as CRM systems (e.g. Salesforce.com), marketing automation tools and web analytics packages.

Monitoring beyond social media. Finally, organizations that actively target both traditional and social media may want to look at tools like Vocus, Cision and/or Sysomos which integrate PR and social media monitoring functions into a single platform. Social media isn’t an island and marketing / outreach efforts there should ideally be integrated with other programs, so in these environments, monitoring capabilities beyond social media become valuable.

Keeping these nine criteria in mind (or least those that pertain to the size and complexity of social media efforts in your organization) will help you make the right choice from among the broad array of social media monitoring tools on the market.

Until fairly recently, keeping track of your organization’s online presence was relatively easy. Other than your company’s website, most mentions were likely in well-known online news sites or trade industry publication sites. Your PR team was aware of most of these as it often had a hand in generating those placements. A simple tool like Google Alerts would pick up most stray citations.

No more. The explosion of social media has led to a corresponding need for more sophisticated monitoring tools that can crawl the hundreds of social networking and bookmarking sites and millions of blogs across the globe. A rapidly proliferating collection of tools are being developed to meet the need. You can find a list of more than 150 social media monitoring tools here or close to 200 here, but—that can seem overwhelming. For those short on time and seeking a shorter list of tools to evaluate, below are nine tools at various price levels that may or may not be the best but are certainly among the most popular and capable social media monitoring tools currently available.

Budget: $0 (I have no budget, I need something free!)

Though limited (in terms of filters, number of search terms and results) in comparison to the fee-based version of the tool, SM2 Freemium is still an excellent tool for getting a snapshot of your social media landscape—discovering who’s talking about you, your competitors and your industry, what they’re saying, and where they are saying it. Results can be exported to Excel for further sorting and analysis. I’ve used this tool on behalf of small clients for finding hundreds of key influencers on Twitter, blogs and various other social networking sites and forums. The only caveat is that this may whet your appetite for the full version (see below).

UPDATE February 21, 2012: The Freemium version disappeared from the Alterian site. When I inquired about it, I received this response: “Thank you for your question. Alterian (acquired by SDL on January 27, 2012) no longer offers the Freemium version of SM2 online. If you are interested in licensing our product, the initial license fee starts at $18,000 per year.”

Another excellent free tool for finding relevant influencers across the social media sphere, Social Mention is a real-time social search engine that also provides alerts and a cool buzz-monitoring widget you can add to your website or blog. If Google Alerts had been developed with a focus on social media, this would be it. This tool is fast, easy to use, and offers a useful set of filters for finding mentions of a company or topic in specific types of social interaction (e.g. blogs, microblogging sites, social networks, etc.).

Budget: Under $500 per month

An easy-to-use, graphically rich tool that provides monitoring (who’s talking about you, your competitors, key industry terms and trends, etc., and where they are talking about it), sentiment analysis, and collaboration tools for acting on the information. It may not catch everything, but it finds a lot (via blogs, Twitter, social news sites and Facebook public pages) and presents the information through useful charts and graphs. Several pricing options are available, most under $500 per month.

Along with the monitoring and alert features you’d expect, Trackur also includes a proprietary algorithm for displaying the influence and reach of individuals discussing your brand or topic—so you can focus on power users and ignore trolls and spammers. Andy Beal and his team have built a nice tool that’s garnered favorable reviews from TechCrunch and other prominent tech sites. As with UberVU, several pricing / service levels are available under $500 per month.

Budget: $500-1,000 per month

The fee-based version of SM2 does everything the freemium version does plus providing unlimited searches and results, filters, boolean search strings and alerts. Its monitoring covers blogs, message boards, forums, microblogging sites, wikis, media sharing sites, social networks, online classifieds and review sites. SM2 provides enough social media monitoring power to be relied upon by some fairly large brands, at a price point affordable to midsized and even socially active smaller companies.

Popular with agencies as well as corporate users, Radian6 offers a rich set of tools for social media monitoring, responding, tracking, benchmarking and analytics. The Radian6 Dashboard enables you to monitor conversations in real time, while the Engagement Console lets you respond directly or route posts to appropriate individuals or teams and analyze the results of social media interactions.

Cision combines its own PR tracking capabilities built on the former Bacon’s clipping service (older PR pros, you may need to explain to your younger counterparts what a “clipping service” was back in the day) with a white-labeled version of Radian6 to provide markets and PR professionals with a 360-degree view of brand mentions and trends across traditional and social media. Cision’s tools are designed to help organizations of almost any size that are active in PR and social media relations “plan their stories, connect with audiences, monitor media coverage and analyze results.”

Vocus provides a rich set of tools for traditional and social media monitoring, media outreach and news distribution. The company’s built-from-the-ground-up monitoring tools cover more than 50,000 traditional media outlets, every major social media site and 20 million blogs. Its database of 270,000 U.S. / 500,000 global media contacts is invaluable for connecting with the right writers and performing effective outreach. Through PRWeb, which Vocus acquired in 2006, it offers extensive news distribution and tracking capabilities. Social media monitoring can be purchased separately for $3000 per year (putting that tool effectively in the $0-500 per month category) though most users combine at least a subset of the PR tools with this.

Budget: We don’t need no stinkin’ budget

If you’re familiar with terms like product placement and slotting fees, and your brand is familiar to consumers through prime time TV advertising, you should probably evaluate this tool. If all of those things are true and your company is social media savvy, there’s a good chance you’re already using it. Nielsen’s monitoring covers more than 100 million blogs, social networking sites, discussion boards and other sites where consumers can post content. It provides capabilities for capturing customer insights, response, brand management and social media outreach tracking. Forrester Research has named Nielsen a leader in brand monitoring solutions, saying “the vendor has the strongest strategic vision and currently competes at a scale unmatched by any other competitor.”

These tools are among the best for social media monitoring, whatever your budget and needs. But, as noted above, the social media monitoring space is highly dynamic, with new tools and improvements to existing tools constantly being introduced. If I overlooked your favorite tool, leave a comment below.

Also, as a test—since this post is about social monitoring tool vendors, let’s see how many of them promote it or respond to it, either with a comment here or on other social media outlets, and how quickly they do so.

Looking for a way to monitor social media activities and results on a tight budget? Want to show the world how social you are with a cool widget on your website or blog? How about a real-time search tool to see what’s being said about your company or any topic of interest right now? Interested in an easy way to stay current on key Google Analytics traffic stats from your desktop? Need a way to edit video and photos without the expense and overhead of a pricey editing application?

You’ll find all of this and more in this collection of tools and reviews of some of the coolest free or low-cost social media monitoring and web tools so far this year.

Cool Web Tools

Social Mention
***** 5 stars
A powerful real-time social search engine that not only displays results for a specified term or phrase, but lets you filter results by source (e.g., blogs, microblogging sites, social bookmarking, images, video), and shows associated metrics like sentiment, top keywords, top users (who’s talking about this topic most actively) and sources. You can narrow search results to a specific timeframe and sort by date or source. Social Mention also lets you set up alerts (simiar to Google Alerts) and offers a widget that can be installed on a website or blog to display the real-time buzz about your specified topic.

A social media monitoring tool that combines powerful features (e.g., historical and real-time data, sentiment analysis, platform filtering) and ease of use with a more attractive monthly price than many well-known competitors.

A quick and handy way to get a snapshot of the “social media rank” of any website. Metrics include traffic stats from Alexa, Compete and Quantcast; backlinks and results by search engine; backlinks and mentions on the major social news sites and more.

A cool, free blog widget that automatically displays links, along with thumbnail images, to related posts on your blog at the bottom of each blog post you publish. Visitors can rate posts and you also get click statistics. It takes a bit longer to install than they claim but isn’t terribly difficult.

An online video editor than enables you to mix videos footage, images and soundtracks and add effects to create standard or high-definition online videos. Your first video is free. After that, their standard pricing model is designed for high-volume production but plans are available for less frequent use as well.

Polaris (no longer active)

***** 5 Stars
Want a quick snapshot of how your website—or any number of websites you track through Google Analytics—is performing? Now there’s no need to log in to GA just for a simple check. Polaris is a slick, free Adobe Air-based desktop tool that displays eight GA charts at a glance, including the dashboard, traffic sources, top content, keywords and goal values.

Do you really love a particular topic, company, website or public figure? Or really hate one? Care what others think? This is the site for you. Amplicate is a user-driven site that shows you at a glance how many people love or hate any of thousands of different entities across dozens of categories. For example, (at last check) in the social networks category, three times as many (67 to 22) people loved ecademy as hated it, while more than twice as many (18,163 to 8,632) hated Facebook as loved it (not that Zuckerberg is terribly worried). Joe Biden gets 86% love, but Barack Obama only 48%. Okay, so it may not be scientific, but it is fascinating.

Twitter saves “only” your last 3,200 tweets. For those who feel they really need to hang on to more than that, BackUpMyTweets offers a free service to save all their snippets of 140-character brilliance. The site also offers tools for backing up web mail accounts, blogs and online photos.

Reviews of More Cool Tools

According to some estimates, there may be as many as 50 million PowerPoint presentations publicly available on the web. But searching for them can be a pain. Sure you can use a general search engine with PPT as a filetype query, but you can save yourself work and typing by utilizing one of these PowerPoint-specific search engines to do the digging.

Robin Wauters reviews Trackur, an online reputation management and social media monitoring tool created by Andy Beal and team. Trackur is sort of Google Alerts on steroids and competes with products like Radian6 and Attentio. This is a slick tool, and my one experience with their support team was impressively brief and helpful.

Mini-reviews of 10 helpful tools such as WobZIP, an online utility for unzipping files on admin-proteced computers; Mitto, an online password manager; and Web Page to PDF, which is kind of self-explanatory.

Chanpory Rith reviews 10 free online tools that offer many of the features of PhotoShop with the high cost or complexity, including Picnik (possibly the best free online photo editor), PhotoShop Express, Snipshot and flauntR.

Maria Pergolino of Marketo reviews five popular tools including CoTweet, a Twitter tool that enable users to track keyword or brand mentions and even assign responses to particular individuals (for example, by product line). These are familiar but essential tools for the b2b marketer’s toolbox.

Google may be the 800-pound gorilla of search engines but as this post reminds us, it’s not alone in the jungle. Here you’ll find a alphabetical list of 30+ alternative search engines from Ask and Rich Skrenta’s Blekko to social search engine Stumpedia and “computational knowledge engine” Wolfram Alpha.

Shelly Palmer discusses four tools worth checking out including BugMeNot (for creating website logins that won’t get you spammed) and Phonezoo, a site where you can find and create custom cell phone ringtones.

With the amount of helpful content about social media marketing growing faster than Facebook’s user base or Lindsay Lohan’s court appearances, it’s tough to keep up. Here’s a modest contribution to help with that effort; more than six dozen of the best, most bookmark-able articles and blog posts about social media tactics, tools and strategies written so far this year, by leading writers like John Jantsch, Lori Dicker, Lee Odden, Lisa Barone, Jay Baer and many more.

Social Media Marketing Tips, Tactics and Guides

Todd Heim supplies a helpful guide to best practices for building a following on and generating traffic from social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, Mixx and Propeller. Todd’s guidance is straightforward and practical; finding the time to do this well is the hard part.

For those who know little if anything about social media (there are more such people than you may realize; some in rather lofty positions at that), John McTigue offers an excellent primer covering the most popular tools, sites and strategies.

Despite the widespread use of the phrase “social media marketing,” marketing is not the only business use of social media, as John Jantsch reminds us. Here he outlines five ways that sales can use these tools as well, from social CRM to teaching prospects how to solve business issues.

Noting that “Smart and savvy companies have positioned themselves as authoritative experts and trusted sources of information by creating their own content,” Gordon Plutsky outlines a six-step process for consistently connecting with prospects through relevant, compelling content.

Social media has dramatically altered the buying process as well as marketing practices. In this post, Bill Rice provides sales people with 10 principles for using social media in sales, from setting objectives and listening to creativity and tools to improve social media efficiency. Given the importance of sales-marketing alignment, this is a worthwhile read for marketers as well.

Mark Price summarizes a Fast Company case study on how restaurant chain Houlihan’s engaged their best customers through some exclusive social media programs to increase sales and profits, and what other social media marketers can learn from the chain’s experience.

Not sure how to navigate through various social media sites? Addy Dugdale shares this handy CMO guide to the social landscape, which “takes all the major social media sites in the U.S. and analyzes their capabilities in four sectors: customer communication, brand exposure, driving traffic to your site, and SEOs.”

Christina Warren tells b2b marketers how to use Twitter effectively, find their “social voice,” efficiently monitor industry developments through social media, expand their influence and more in this excellent post.

Rebecca Corliss reveals an easy five-step, 10-minute daily process for keeping on eye on what’s being said about your company across popular social media venues. Depending on how active your company is in social media, it may take a bit more than 10 minutes and may have to be done more than once per day, but at a minimum this is a great place to start.

If you want to be a success in social media, then you definitely don’t want to be part of any of these groups. Kevin Barenblat presentes a taxonomy of social media failure types, including “canned responders,” spammers, lurkers and serial re-tweeters.

For those whose social media marketing programs aren’t quite meeting expectations, Lisa Barone offers several possible reasons (and advice on how to fix things), such as having poor content, putting the wrong people in charge or simply not listening.

Following on the theme of Lisa’s post above, Lori Dicker offers a collection of indicators that your social media marketing has gone astray such as “An intern handles all your social media efforts” and “Your company does not have a (written) social media policy” and how to place efforts on the right track.

For those still struggling with where to start in social media, Denise Wakeman lays out “a three-step formula to get you started creating a visible presence on the web, resulting in more opportunities for your business: leads, prospects, sales, media queries, speaking gigs and joint ventures.”

Contending that “finding exactly which of your customers and prospects are on which social networks and who are the most socially connected, is the first step to figuring out if and how to integrate social media into your marketing mix,” Gary Halliwell illustrates how to tie your CRM data to social media marketing efforts, and why this is crucial to creating value for your company through social media.

Just as etiquette is what separates us from the beasts (well, that plus some DNA), so social media etiquette often separates the successful from the spammy, the engaging from the enraging, the outgoing from the obnoxious. David Lavenda supplies five rules here (such as “Respect people’s privacy online, even if you don’t have to”) to help you stay on the positive side of those word pairs.

Sharon Lane lays out the basic elements for social media success, such as knowing your audience, being authentic and being patient. Good post for newbies as well as those at the “a little knowledge is dangerous” phase.

A collection of short summaries and links to a huge list of posts about Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, mobile marketing and business development. It’s sort of like this post, except that all of the links are to other Mashable articles. Hmm. Guess Webbiquity is a bit less about ego and more about sharing the love.

Adrian Swinscoe shares an excellent collection of social media do’s and don’ts such as defining your goals to keep yourself on track, great content is crucial, and perhaps most importantly, “It takes time, persistence, consistency and commitment to generate results.”

*****5 stars
Oli Gardner reveals key tactics for converting social media followers into buyers, from using a landing page with a clear call to action and offering “social proof” through badges and widgets to optimizing post-conversion opportunities.

Daniel Flamberg proposes four key metrics that can give marketers “actionable intelligence to identify competitive strengths or vulnerabilities, shape messages, identify informal opinion leaders and influencers or suggest the best choice of media channels” along with suggested tools to track those measures.

Kristi Hines details half a dozen social media mistakes to avoid (or correct) including having the wrong connections, sending the wrong messages, and restricting your activities to “things that can be measured for return on investment.” She also lists “using social media profiles for link building” as a mistake, though there are situations in which this makes sense; you may want to grab a profile on a lesser-known social media site for purposes of reputation management or brand protection. Even if there isn’t enough relevant traffic on that site to make a large effort in network-building and interaction worthwhile, any links you include in your profile still have value.

Noting that “social media is no different than the social circles that existed in the 20?s, 50?s, 70?s and even 80 ‘s. Yes, the same rules apply. Just executed on a different platform and at a higher volume,” Pam Moore passes along 50 social media etiquette tips from Great Granny Walton. Among these nuggets of fold wisdom: “Be a friend to get a friend,” “Plan yer work and work yer plan” and “It is just darn right rude to auto DM when Tweeters follow ya’!”

Want your story on the front page of a popular social media site? You need help from the power users in that community. Greg Finn introduces a dozen tools and pages to help identify the most influential users to connect with on various social sites including Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Twitter.

Social media jargon can be confusing for newbies, and even seasoned pros occasionally run across unfamiliar terms. To help out, Sean Horrigan has compiled this glossary of social media terms from aggregator, blogs and crowdsourcing to thumbstream, widget and wikis.

Trevor Jonas explains how Google’s various tools — from Google News and blog search to Google Reader and Analytics — combined create a powerful and free social media monitoring platform, and how these would enable Google to “absolutely blow away any of the existing monitoring services tomorrow if it wanted to.”

Christina Warren reviews 10 tools on her list of social media favorites, including some surprises. Note: most are fee-based, but worth the cost for midsized to large enterprises active in social media marketing.

***** 5 stars
Some day in the future, when social media is a mature marketing channel, there will likely be only a handful of high-quality, comprenhensive monitoring tools on the market for marketers to choose from. Today, however, social media monitoring tools are still in their wild west phase: there are a large number, of varying quality, each of which does something or a few things very well, but none of which are yet the “Holy Grail” of monitoring. Ken Burbary has done a masterful job of compiling this list, currently at 145 social media monitoring alternatives. The list is likely to grow before it consolidates.

In an organization of any size, you’ll have multiple people using social media sites. In large organizations, this can be hundreds or thousands of employees. While management can’t, and shouldn’t seek to, tightly control all such interactions, it is imperative to have basic guidelines in place. That’s where a social media policy comes in, and if you’re not sure how to write one or what to include, check out this extensive set of examples.

Social media monitoring and interaction activity can be tough to maintain. So Erica Swallow helpfully provides “a list of 11 free services for scheduling social media updates, either across multiple social platforms or just for Twitter. At the end of the list, you’ll also find a quick note on 11 paid services that you may be interested in investigating, as well.”

Social Media Marketing Strategy

A fact- and statistic-rich SlideShare presentation covering social media reach, growth, demographics, consumer and b2b buyer behavior on social networks, spending levels by industry and strategies for success.

Noting that social media be used for various business purposes (marketing, PR, market research, customer service), Larry Weintraub cuts to the chase with practical guidance, writing “ultimately you want to do one thing: sell more products or services. Let’s take a look at how each of these four components of your social media strategy can help you sell more.”

Another social media SlideShare presentation, this one focused around trends and rich with both useful guidance and examples from brands that have achieved social media success. It also includes a helpful section on metrics, introducing the SIM score.

Alex Romanovich contends that social media is far more than just another marketing channel; it is phenomena that is “forcing corporations (brands) to look at how they engage with their clients, how they use information, and how they respond to events…the benefits and opportunities it presents are something we’ve never seen before. It is becoming the connecting thread that links all points of the Value Chain.”

Got some time? Here’s a nice collection of 10 exceptional social media SlideShare and YouTube presentations, including “Web 3.0 – This time its personal,” “Content Strategy for Social Media” and “How to make the best use of SEO and Social Media.”

Interesting video filled with trivia and statistics on the growth and current state of social media, such as that there were 90 trillion email messages sent last year (though roughly 80% were spam), Facebook serves six million pageviews per minute (is that possible?) and that YouTube serves one billion videos per day.

Israel Garcia offers a compact model of how social media has changed the historical pattern of corporate and marketing communications, and how to capitalize on that trends. He also makes a compelling case for doing so, pointing out research showing that “consumers are 67% more likely to buy from the brands they follow on Twitter, and 51% more likely to buy from a brand they follow on Facebook.”

Rob Key argues that the term “social media” needs to be killed because (almost) all media is becoming social, and it isn’t the tools or buzzwords that really matter in business so much as what social media can do in areas like risk management, media relations, product life cycle management, customer care, HR, market research, and innovation.

Jeff Bullas offers several suggestions for selling social media to executives. #1, “scare them” is tempting but perhaps not the ideal approach, while #5 (use website grading as a baseline measurement) has real potential. #4 (buy them a book) works well if [italics] you have the kind of boss who actually reads books.

Writing that “the intention for gathering (social media) data should NEVER be for spamming but to help integrate your value proposition into what people are truly interested in,” Eric Tsai lays out a framework for gathering data, analyzing it, and using it to make decisions and modify activities so that you can ultimately do “more of what works and less of what doesn’t.”

***** 5 stars
Tamar Weinberg has written one of the most thoughtful and creative blog posts of the year, explaing social media strategy through the alphabet from “always be listening” to “zealous” (and yes, she even includes entries for the letters q and x). Simply brilliant, a must read.

Uwe Hook helpfully makes the case that “Social Media is not free. Social Media is not cheap. Social Media requires a considerable of time and resources to make it work.” A toe-in-the-water approach doesn’t work with social media; it requires a commitment and a sustained investment, because while the payback can be considerable, it won’t happen overnight.

Michael Brenner provides an outstanding guide to getting executive buy-in for social media marketing, beginning with showing them the numbers behind the new reality and progressing through resources to help you answer the (inevitable) hard questions and developing a social media roadmap.

***** 5 stars
“Why exactly should we do this social media stuff?” Rather than fumbling to articulate a brilliant answer when you get that question from an executive or client, refer to this outstanding post from Pam Dyer, packed with ammunition like increasing brand recognition, improving SEO, taking your message directly to buyers, and making it clear that you “get it” (at this stage, as Pam notes, “If you don’t have a presence, you appear as if you’re not very savvy.”).

If the boss or client remains a skeptic even after following Pam’s guidance above, you may need to pull out this post. “Aha!” your skeptical counterpart will say, “I knew it! Social media is just a fad.” Actually, it’s not that simply, and you may be surprised by the conclusions Michael Estrin draws in this insightful post.

First a bubble, then a joke? Is this more fodder for social media skeptics? Not quite, but Victoria Ipri offers a helpful reminder here to avoid jargon — both when selling social media and when using it. In her words, “simple, to the point, interesting, thought-provoking, but not especially flowery or verbose” messages are key in both situations.

***** 5 stars
In another outstanding post from Lisa Barone, learn what it’s crucial to do before getting immersed in social media marketing. Just as a strong foundation is critical to the long-term stability of a home or building, so steps like crafting a social media policy or rulebook, assigning responsibilities, and making a commitment to responding are vital to social media success.

Once you’ve decided on a set of metrics to monitor and tools to use (see the section above), now what? Matt Rhodes notes that “What you do with your social media monitoring is as important, if not more important, than getting the monitoring in place in the first place. Different brands will want to engage with the conversations they discover online in different ways,” and suggests three actionable areas based on monitoring results.

Whether you’re already engaged in social media marketing and not seeing the results hoped for, or you’re just getting started and want to avoid common pitfalls, this post will help you avoid strategic mistakes (such as treaing social media as a silo) and steer your efforts in the right direction.

Eric Anderson eloquently makes the case for b2b use of social media marketing. “B2B sales tend to be complex and consultative, after all, and where do B2B buyers go for consultation? A surprising number start with simple Google searches, and those Google searches increasingly lead to, yep, industry blogs and forums.”

***** 5 stars
A long but brilliant post on the executive view of social media, starting with, as the title indicates, some of the reasons C-level people hate social media including “don’t feed me another fad” and “eagles don’t flock.” Midway through, however, the tone changes as the author writes “Maybe I don’t HATE social media after all. Maybe I just hate the Quixotic context in which most social media conversations exist, featuring a perpetually moving target, combined with an obsessive, cult-like worship of the default worldview,” then proceeds to detail five of the top benefits of social media from the executive perspective.

Alyson Shontell quotes Nicole Melander, PhD, who teaches American University’s MBA course on social media for business, saying “At this point companies don’t have a choice (about participating in social media). They have to play in the arena somehow. The conversation is happening, it’s just a matter of how much a company chooses to participate.” Melander then presents a five-step guide to creating a business social media strategy.

Adam Kleinberg extols the virtues of the Net Promoter score, introduced by Frederick Recihheld in his book The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth. He makes the case that this metric is one of the most vital, meaningful and valuable ways to measure the impact of social media marketing activities.